Pete's Quote Files: B

Please read the disclaimer. This quote database was last updated in early 2000.

Quotes by people associated with the letter 'B'

On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
-Charles Babbage


Many a man owes his success to his first wife and his second wife to his success.
-Jim Backus


No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.
-Honore de Balzac


Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.
-P.T. Barnum


I don't know what's wrong with my television set. I was getting C-Span and the Home Shopping Network on the same station. I actually bought a congressman.
-Bruce Baum


You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.
-Charles A. Beard


When one door closes another door opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.
-Alexander Graham Bell


Most fish live underwater, which is a terrible place to have sex because virtually anywhere you lie down there will be stinging crabs and large quantities of little fish staring at you with buggy little eyes. So generally when two fish want to have sex, they swim around and around for hours, looking for someplace to go, until finally the female gets really tired and has a terrible headache, and she just dumps her eggs right on the sand and swims away. Then the male, driven by some timeless, noble instinct for survival, eats the eggs. So the truth is that fish don't reproduce at all, but there are so many of them that it doesn't make any difference.
-Dave Barry, "Sex and the Single Amoeba: What Every Teen Should Know"


I recently read that love is entirely a matter of chemistry. That must be why my wife treats me like toxic waste.
-David Bissonette


Imagination rules the world.
-Napoleon Bonaparte


Impossible is a word to be found only in the dictionary of fools.
-Napoleon Bonaparte


Rascality has limits, stupidity has not.
-Napoleon Bonaparte


I have six locks on my door all in a row. When I go out, I lock every other one. I figure no matter how long somebody stands there picking the locks, they are always locking three.
-Elayne Boosler


The way to deal with bureaucrats is with stealth and sudden violence.
-Boutros Boutros-Ghali


Documentation is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very good; and when it is bad, it is better than nothing.
-Dick Brandon


I'm going to write because I cannot help it.
-Charlotte Bronte


Look at Jewish history. Unrelieved lamenting would be intolerable. So, for every ten Jews beating their breasts, God designated one to be crazy and amuse the breast-beaters. By the time I was five I knew I was that one.
-Mel Brooks


Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love.
-Charlie Brown


There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth: (1) not going all the way; and (2) not starting.
-Buddha


Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to describe the history of the computer industry for the past decade as a massive attempt to keep up with Apple.
-Byte Magazine, 12/94